More Nurses and Better Nurse Education Lower Inpatient Mortality

In an era of increasing healthcare expenditures, trimming nursing staff is an option for containing costs. But, does doing more with less adversely affect patient outcomes? To find out, researchers surveyed more than 26,000 professional nurses at 300 hospitals in 9 European countries and obtained discharge data from these hospitals on 422,000 patients (age, ≥50) who underwent general, orthopedic, or vascular surgery and were hospitalized for ≥2 days around the same time as the nurse surveys.

An increase in a nurse's workload of one patient was associated with a 7% increase in the likelihood of a surgical patient dying within 30 days of hospital admission, and every 10% increase in the percentage of nurses on staff with bachelor's degrees was…